Shakespeare Complete Playlist

What sets apart a weblog like mine, currently hosted at astrofish.blog, apart, is its completely unrestricted use of style and content. Mix, match, never can tell. One thing’s for sure, always a tad eccentric.

“Kramer, you’re not eccentric. You can’t even find ‘eccentric’ in the rear view mirror; you passed it that far back.”

Thank you.

Over the years, I’ve toyed with my Shakespeare Complete Playlist, the complete list of plays. Originally, I used the 37 plays as a secular bible, can quote Shakespeare and not many people get offended.

• Complete List
• Complete list updated

This last summer, UT (University of Texas, Austin) agreed with the Oxford (UK) publication that includes a previously unattached anonymous play as part of Shakespeare’s canon, the play called “Arden of Faversham.”

As noted before, chronologically, it fits around Shakespeare’s Henry 6 trilogy, which, in a separate academic notation, is now considered to be a probable collaboration rather than “solely authored by.” Computers are so much fun for textual analysis.

At some point, though, the academic questions become just that, and there’s only so much time that one can spend on the questions of authorship, and who wrote what, when. For my purposes? A simple list, time-honored, and reasonably correct, and now, I think I’ve listened to each play at least once or twice, with both Julius Caesar and the Henry 6 trilogy currently in heavy rotation, or was, and is, just as I’m trying to get my head wrapped around the nuances of the history and language of those early Henry 6 plays.

Henry 6 (I-II-III), 8 hours, 51 minutes.

Julius Caesar was just in production, but before that, it was, a couple of years prior, a performance was a subject of great controversy.

Personally, I’d see the current politics similar to that play, but not in the way that caused the controversy — a New York group cast a Trump look-alike as Caesar. Much hue and cry, with some of the arts defunded, but that’s not a call I would make.

I did listen to the plays I had on hand before going out to Winedale last summer.

Shakespeare Complete Playlist

• 1589 Arden of Faversham
• 1590–91 Henry VI, Part II
• 1590–91 Henry VI, Part III
• 1591–92 Henry VI, Part I
• 1592–93 Richard III
• 1592–93 Comedy of Errors
• 1593–94 Titus Andronicus
• 1593–94 Taming of the Shrew
• 1594–95 Two Gentlemen of Verona
• 1594–95 Love’s Labour’s Lost
• 1594–95 Romeo and Juliet
• 1596 Edward III
• 1595–96 Richard II
• 1595–96 A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• 1596–97 King John
• 1596–97 The Merchant of Venice
• 1597–98 Henry IV, Part I
• 1597–98 Henry IV, Part II
• 1598–99 Much Ado About Nothing
• 1598–99 Henry V
• 1599–1600 Julius Caesar
• 1599–1600 As You Like It
• 1599–1600 Twelfth Night
• 1600–01 Hamlet
• 1600–01 The Merry Wives of Windsor
• 1601–02 Troilus and Cressida
• 1602–03 All’s Well That Ends Well
• 1604–05 Measure for Measure
• 1604–05 Othello
• 1605–06 King Lear
• 1605–06 Macbeth
• 1606–07 Antony and Cleopatra
• 1607–08 Coriolanus
• 1607–08 Timon of Athens
• 1608–09 Pericles
• 1609–10 Cymbeline
• 1610–11 The Winter’s Tale
• 1611 Sir Thomas More
• 1611–12 The Tempest
• 1612–13 Henry VIII
• 1612–13 The Two Noble Kinsmen
• 1611 Sir Thomas More
• 1613 Double Falsehood

Shakespeare Complete Playlist

Once missing from the current list with either one or two with bullet points already, as well, Edward III was disputed, and Sir Thomas More was pretty clearly an addendum. For my Shakespeare Complete Playlist, though, I get to include them, along with the The Two Noble Kinsmen, and Double Falsehood. The apocrypha is as interesting to me, as is the classical versions. Speaking with one actor recently, he noted that Shakespeare’s fine hand and ear could be easily detected in portions of Arden of Faversham, and that’s from an actor’s view.

Still, that weighs at 39 or 41 plays, with two that are certainly missing, the long lost manuscripts for Cardenio and Love’s Labour’s Found. There were records of the plays having been performed, or entered into the register of the time, the titles exist. No extant manuscripts, though.

There’s another play, think I had a modern copy for a while, attributed to Shakespeare, but pretty clearly a forgery or just false attribution, “Merlin.” Pretty quickly that was glommed onto by certain Arthurian Fantasy New Agers. Might be remiss if I didn’t point out that the myth is different from the facts. With an asterisk? I never let the facts interfere: it’s a birthright, you know.

Shakespeare Complete Playlist

What I do is put the plays on a — more or less — chronological play list, and gradually listen to the plays all the way through. The exceptions are with this early play, and I hadn’t — yet — found a public domain recording of Arden of Faverhsam, as duly noted. The other part is Henry 6, which I tend to listen to in the plays’ numerical and alleged historical order rather than a strict timeline of production. Makes it a tad easier for me to figure out what’s happening.

Henry 6 trilogy has some fascinating bits and little nuggets of high-impact poetry buried in its lumbering walls of historical fiction done as verse on an Elizabethan stage. Stands up well to being used as background noise, and sooner — or later — I might actually get a grip on the tale itself.

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Shakespeare Complete Playlist

Not really a big “wiki” fan, but for concise, possibly suspect data, but simple and reasonably straightforward, it is a quick source for an overview. Good as place as any to start, methinks. The links just give a quick overview of what current scholarship suggest might — or might not — be true.

As Shakespeare said?

“O Wikipedia, thou liest as thou art but a shallow knave.”

My original list of 36 plays? It now stretches to 42, or so.

I was an English major, you do the math.

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Wiki links

Cardenio
Love’s Labour’s Won
Sir Thomas More
Edward III
Double Falsehood
The Birth of Merlin

Shakespeare’s Apocrypha

#Shakespeare